I have been working on this one for quite a while.

The Age of Reason

This one represents the first times that I have conentrated on adding a few finishing touches to a work. I have layers of sessions pasted across the face here.

I think the runner at the bottom is one of the most interesting aspects of the work. It is a plastic running board. On the right you can see a 35mm negative netted in the plastic. I have planned on placing a written word in the running plastic. It can be seen here. I have ideas of placing led lights behind the text. Illuminating it from behind.

I have also begun to use manufactured plastic parts. This is a compact image machine.

Maps for

Vancouver OperationsPostcards for the shadow-seers

here is the text in bold

Thursday April 20 2006


I have had another session with new work. These are called Tunnel_Eyes and Compass. They are still in their early stages.

Tunnel Eyes

In this tunnel series I am using as seen above I am using a trace image of a bus stop and several viewing ports through which a image is rendered. I like this one because it presents several different viewing situations. Yet it is impossible to say which is the correct one.

Eyes are one means as are windows and spaces that are travelling. In fact vehicles are themselves opportunities for viewing and-or watching.


Compass

I think this one says alot of who I am. I inclued myself again in the portrait. I have a sides to myself here. Sides which present a different shadow. I was going to include a mirror on the decaled arm.

Thursday April 20 2006

Last night I was working on a few things at once. In preparation of doing this blog I decided I wanted to show a couple of pieces.

The first one here is a print from a transparency onto a piece of paper.


I like the way it turned out. It looks like it turned out. It has this sort of print-feel and it seems like less of a painting.








This one combines an image of mine on photo-paper with a cut out imgage of a roller coaster. I tried to pay attention to the framing of the image on the paper I wanted to keep te natural outline of the image and extend the depth of the work by adding the coaster image. If anything i think it is a first step in me combining theese source materials. It is my first attempt.
I think this will be the first and primary document in a series I will call the Transaction series. I see it as a passage. A passage not just for a single body but a series of bodies or selves.

This next one is the first idea that I have sacraficed to paper in a series I am hoping to call the Minus Landscapes. I will be doing extensive work on this idea I think and it will be based on architecture that is taken out of its environment. And I would like to have various commentary about this. The main point of access being that architecure is not public, but private media and that using its likeness is a public phenonmenon. For this project I would like to follow the law to the point. To use it as my guiding force. I would follow the law to the letter and not photograph or reproduce the likness of a work of architecture for the sake of being sued by the builder.

This is my second attmept. I think it perhaps looks better. I think it presents the idea better by focuessing on the subtraction.

DRAWING SHADOWS ON THE WALL

I am trying to adopt a new way of

looking at my work.

I need an alternate way of experiencing my work because I am finding that

I am lacking a critical and or fresh view of my work as I exist with it.

I create it but rarely enjoy it.

I find myself spending time working yet rarely reflecting on past or even current work. My head is bowed and I toil. Rarely looking up to see all the potential subject matter which surrounds me.

I have created a closed self-referential system, which lacks any potential of forward potential.

I am in Plato's cave and I am drawing the shadows on the wall.

The result is that I have deciced to use my blog to post my work and reflect on it. I will use this as an imaging tool to create discussion and and of my work. This resulting electronic document will enable me to account and amount my total and piecemeal comments. It will also be a site where commentary can be catalogued.

This will create a language and discourse to the work.

My fear is and always has been that my work has become a Temporary Labour. That it exists for my moment of labour and not outside of it. I want there to be more than just a material exixtence for the work. I know that there is more there but I do not appreciate it. I find no recouse and haven't for years.

So let this be the inaugrial day.

Beau Travail

Really what is the meaning of work and when does it become beautiful. Is it in the content? or is it in the practice? I think I have had it all wrong for quite a while. I was content at just being at work.

What I have lost in my work is a sense of process and sense of challenge. I am not working on problems I am just creating them and i think what this has done is separate me with the relevancy of my work.

I have fallen into an abyss of self-gratification. There needs to be a critical aspect to the work, otherwise it is just seen as craft. Craft is a process that exists indefinitely, spiralling into and through society. Art is different in that it exists as dependent on society, as a seperate entitiy. It needs capital and industry, attention and a mode to exist in.

In a way I see it to need an egg to exist within. It needs a formally structured holding chamber from which it can be showcased, attributed and boasted from and upon.

My work has become a series of visualizations that only exist in the false and tepid imaginations that I have. They have little effect and impact in the breathing world and that said I think I have just as hard of a time manifesting these prob-jects because of my divorce with the practical and manual. The image in my head is far different than that which I can create with my hands, in fact making these things with my hands for the first time.

There needs to be a consequence to the project's arrival. I need a place and a schedule and a mode for investigation. I need a stance and problems which I have confronted and faced. Investigated and created with or without. I need to have this sort of strict agenda, otherwise the whole thing is a sham, as explained above.

Procedure

1. studies
2. investigations
3. critical analysis
4. formation
5. presentation

I think this will be the model I will use for my projects. This will be the first draft in an ongoing project of drafts for a work schedule.

I Have No Memory of My Direction

I have trouble talking of this video without sounding like I am writing for an essay or even a professor for that matter. This entry is about a video I saw a couple of nights ago. I Have No Memory of My Direction -by Midi Ondera.

I am having problems thinking about the experience. I find in conflict about the whole thing. I feel that I cannot come to grips with what I feel about the whole thing. I have many reservations about the video, which may be relatedt to the fact that it was one of the first presentations I have been to where the artist was present. As expected she did talk about her prioject. She had an unimpressive pressence. It feigned to grasp my attention, and I thought it reflected on her piece.

She drew heavily from Chris Marker's sans soleil, although I have yet to see it.

It was a travel document at its very core. The subject was in transition, this was evident. It was the dominating movement of the work. Unlike a situation narrative that not only moves forward but linearly, this piece moved on multiple fronts, creating itself as it lived on. Like a plasticine that does not need an initiator.

It was filled with small individual stories that were outlines of the Japan that she was visiting. The stories were fantastic, they not only were part of this filmmakes real/imagined history, they were also very telling of their location. Of japan itself.

The filmmaker asked the audience to sit and allow youself to dream. This was perhaps the same phrase uttered to her by er film professor before a screening of Marker's video. But this was not the case for me there. I found myself constantly being asked to dream in the video, not to mention by the filmmaker herself at the beginning of the screening. The video set the stage for multiple dreams and dream-like stories, but there seemed to be a lack of a motive.

Why would one want to drawn into this space. Is there enought room left by the filmmaker to inhabit. I think not. I think that there was plenty of provocative imagery and scenarios presented by the filmmaker, but they are multiple tracts being presented, that it makes difficult to extend past the first stages of rem.

I thought that the use of multiple still photographic effects was well done. She obviously knows the esthetics of the media. I thought the use of lomo-layouts for video were particularly effective. There was also a fisher-price cam used, televison and video game footage, etc.

But in regards to the myths that she as a filmmaker built on, there were many. The play was in how true or how false these were. But their true-ness to life really was rrelevant. It was the quality of the story that really did matter. For example there is a myth that is recounted of a dog named Hatchiko.

And of particular concern to me was in my view an inevitability. It was the pronounced pressence of cell-phones. I thought there ought to have been a reference to this technology. Now this may have also dated and placed the film, but there was such a visible favoritism for it, there had to be a reference but there was not.

I think the problem with this work is that it trys to tell its story, instead of mediate it. Because I think this form of story-telling needs this attribute. I think Kafka can manipulate a story and a storyteller like Borges can mediate a story. The difference ends up being where the reader/subject finds him/itself in the narrative, either on the inside or the out.

-the dog- Hatchiko

-the cat temple

-the fish that swam in the Lake where the American dupped all the celluloid news and propaganda footage after the end of the war.-bake sakana

- the cameras and types of footage used (Apocalpyse Now, Buffy, Sailor Moon, )

-the use of george bush's image, I think this did more to date the video than keep it timeless. It places the video too much, in a specific time and also projects a certain political perspective. I think this detracts from the

-the sneaking and miss-attempt at keeping covert.

-she didnt have an editor.

Nuclear Keyboard Bomb

So I have recently heard a rumour that is going around about the Internet.

Apparently, the military is involved. As we all know, the military was the primary user of what we now know as the Internet and they have yet to relinquish their use of it. In fact they own it. They monitor and manipulate it at extra-terrestrial speeds. That is what they have been hiding, that is what we all don't know. Its their job to know that.

What is going to happen is that,

the Controllers will soon be held hostage by an Other.

This will all be pre-arranged, 'cuz no-body can survive humankind, and

no-body can afford a war. Our commerce will be held hostage.

North America will be the holding closet for an Asian Ascendency.

The inflection of the word "western" will collapse, because it will not

mean anything anymore, the east will be far more superior than being just an other.

Nuclear Keyboard Bomb